VICTORIA - As B.C. moved onto an election footing more than a decade ago, Adrian Dix’s mentor, then-premier Glen Clark, was in characteristic form, all bluster and hyperbole.

“We want more jobs,” he declared in a March 1996 address to forest industry leaders that called for the creation of 20,000 more jobs within four years, and the same number again in the subsequent five years.

Moreover, he warned, if the industry didn’t join his New Democratic Party government in an accord to create those jobs, then “the government can start attaching strings to the access to the trees we own.”

First the demand, then the threat. And after narrowly winning the 1996 election, Clark tried to follow through on his designs for a command economy in the forest sector.

One year later, reporters were airlifted to Prince George, where Clark took the wraps off a “jobs and timber accord,” that would supposedly ensure the delivery of some 40,000 jobs, half direct, half indirect.

“The most ambitious job creation program in the history of Canada,” Clark called it with the same overweening self-confidence that also led him to dare the provincial news media to print his promise to deliver “three — count ‘em three — aluminum smelters.”

But as with the smelters, the accord was pure guff. Indeed, there was no accord. Industry leaders had flatly refused to sign any document containing Clark’s targets, as then-forests minister, Dave Zirnhelt proceeded to explain.

“Nobody is going to sign on the line and say we’ll create x number of jobs,” he confessed to reporters. “Legal agreements scare people off.” Later, he elaborated: “A target is just that — a target. We didn’t say we were going to create those jobs.”

Nor did they. As key players had warned from the outset, far from being able to create tens of thousands of new jobs, the industry was fighting a losing battle against a combination of domestic and global factors to maintain current levels of employment.

“The economy is not co-operating,” as Clark said at one point. “Yes,” added one press gallery wag, “and until it does, the beatings will continue.”

By the time the New Democrats disconnected the link to the jobs and timber accord on the government website in 1999, the “most ambitious job creation project in Canadian history” had coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs in the forest sector.

All part of the train of events that saw the New Democrats reduced to just two in the legislature in the subsequent provincial election, the one that brought the B.C. Liberals to power.

Today, as the Liberals fight for their own political lives, they’d sooner voters focus on the failings that drove the NDP from office rather than their own lengthy and growing train of embarrassments.

But in the course of recalling the earlier premier Clark’s record, I would also underscore the difference between his approach and that of Adrian Dix, his then chief of staff who is now seeking the premier’s office himself.

Dix announced his own plan for the forest industry this week and the contents were to Clark’s jobs and timber accord as night is to day.

No threatening to punch the industry in the nose. “A profitable and competitive forest industry that creates good paying jobs,” was listed as the prime goal of a Dix-led NDP government. Even on the party’s perennial goal of reducing log exports, he promised to “work with industry” to protect existing jobs.

No grandiose targets either. He leaves those to the current premier Clark, with her five, “count ‘em five” — liquefied natural gas terminals and the promise of a quarter-trillion-dollar fund to wipe out the provincial debt.

Instead, with the forest sector having hemorrhaged thousands more jobs under the Liberals than it ever did under the NDP, Dix proposes to start with the basics of recreating the workforce.

“Our top priority — one that’s shared with the industry — is to solve the shortage of skilled workers in the sector by making significant investments in training and apprenticeships.”

He went with the consensus on other points as well. Reinvest in inventory, reforestation, research, planning, reduction of wild fires, funding priorities neglected by the Liberals.

But even as he faulted the government there, he noted how overseas markets for B.C.’s forest products have expanded under the Liberals and pledged to “work with and provide tangible support for industry-led efforts to identify new global markets and grow forest product exports.”

He promised a job protection commissioner “to minimize job loss, help local economies adapt and enhance the long-term economic competitiveness of the resource industries.” That one had the Liberals laughing that if the New Democrats win, the province will need a job protection commissioner.

The price tag for the Dix forest plan was manageable as well, $100 million to be spent over five years, financed out of the growing proceeds from an industry on the upswing.

His grandstanding mentor would have scoffed at participating in such a modest, realistic, low-budget exercise. But Dix learned a lot from watching the earlier premier Clark, and not least when to avoid following his bad example.

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Vaughn Palmer: Dix’s modest proposal for the forest industry

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